


13b - A Story About You

by sage-major (Cinza_Snicholls)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Episode: e013 A Story About You, Night Vale, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 15:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinza_Snicholls/pseuds/sage-major
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t know how, exactly, but you can sense that there is something there, outside. Something alive, and listening.</p><p> <br/>A part b to Episode 13 "A Story About You", about the life that resides inside the crate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	13b - A Story About You

“This is a story about you,” said a booming voice somewhere far above you. And you were pleased, because you'd always wanted to hear a story about yourself. 

Welcome to Night Vale.

This is a story about you.  
You live in a house – a very nice house, considering. You never leave your house, not even to buy groceries. Instead, you find packages of food left on your front doorstep, which you retrieve with your eyes tightly closed. You avoid looking out of the windows, because what you see outside is simultaneously confusing and terrifying.

Your life is not a terrible life, as far as it goes.  
Often, you feel the ground that your house is built on moving beneath your feet, in ways that the ground definitely should not move. Sometimes, the loneliness and the effort of ignoring what you know to be true become too much for you, and you curl up on the floor with your head in your hands. Mostly, you do other things. Distract yourself, and pretend that everything is as it should be.

This story is about you.  
You didn’t always live in the house which you never leave. You lived somewhere else, where there were more trees, more water. You had many acquaintances. You had a friend, and then a girlfriend, and then a fiancée – the same person. She cooked dinner sometimes, but sometimes you cooked. You were happy, and you were not at all afraid to leave your house.

One day you were walking from your front door to your old Ford Probe, and something happened to you. You saw above you a gigantic hand, coming closer. The hand reached for you, and closed around your body. Gentle. Inescapable.  
After this, you remember nothing. You remember nothing, until the moment when you woke up, in the house that you never leave. You are still unsure whether there was really a hand at all, or if it was only your addled mind creating a metaphor for the vast, unpredictable, inescapable hand of fate.

You have been haunted ever since by the idea that you are only a tiny being, and that far, far above you are a people much larger and much more powerful than yourself. Watching everything that you do. Controlling everything that you do.  
The complete lack of freedom. The purposelessness of your life. It terrifies you. 

You have created a new job for yourself.  
Occasionally, you hear a low rumbling sound which vibrates through the very walls of your house. When this happens, your job is to hum loudly until the sound has passed, and you can pretend once more that nothing ever happened. Except today...it was different. 

The rumbling sound came and went, and you ignored it as best you could. It wasn’t terribly interesting. But then, there was a lurch...an awful lurch, beneath your feet. The entire floor of your world was being lifted.  
It settled, and you hoped that such a thing would never happen again. The rumbling sound began again, but it was different from the rumbling sound that you had heard before. Weaker, and rattling. 

Which brings us to now. To this story.

Above the unfamiliar rumbling sound, you can hear, indistinctly, a man’s voice. The man is talking about you.  
You walk to your door, and for the first time since you found yourself in this house that you never leave, you unbolt the door with your eyes wide open. You stare, and you stare, and you stare some more. The world outside your door is brown, and streaked with thin swathes of light, coming from above, and from the left, and from the right. 

You step onto your front doorstep, and then you walk away from your house altogether. Kneeling down to touch the ground, you find that it is made of wood, and marked with the grain of some incomprehensively gigantic tree. You begin to run, and soon you reach a wall of wood. Tracing your hand over it, you find a flat circle of metal embedded in the wood, almost as large as your head. It takes a moment before you realise that the metal is a nail. You start to hum, as loudly as you can, as though you are trying to drown out your own mind. Turning, you walk hurriedly, one hand trailing the wall, as if you are afraid to lose contact. When you reach a corner, you turn and continue, until you have paced out the entire perimeter of your wooden prison. For that, you have realised, is what it is. 

Your house sits in the middle of a square, wooden box. Light shines through the small gaps between the boards which make up the box. You are entirely trapped. Strangely, this comforts you. You have eliminated the unknown.  
You return to your house with a smile on your face. Lying down, you fall into a deep, untroubled sleep. You do not notice when the crate that contains your home is lifted once more and thrown roughly into the trunk of a car. Where are you going? You don’t know, but you go anyway. You are no longer listening to the mysterious man’s voice, smooth, sonorous and far, far above you. 

You wake to the sound of singing. “And you don’t know/no you can’t go where I’ve been/and I don’t know/no I’ll never get where I’m going…”  
Stepping outside your front door, you see a shadow fall across the roof of the box you are standing in. You don’t know how, exactly, but you can sense that there is something there, outside. Something alive, and listening.  
You run inside your house, as if the flimsy walls can protect you.

It is some time before you dare to look out of the window. As you stare, your world is changed forever. High, high above, you can see the faint light of stars. Someone, or possibly something, has opened the box. A hand reaches past the window, and you find that the floor – and in fact, your entire house – is being lifted, up and out. The view from your window fills with a gigantic nose.  
A deep, rumbling voice says, “Undamaged” and you are almost knocked over by the vibrations caused by the sound. 

Unsteadily, you walk through your house, peering out of the windows. You are high above the ground, so incredibly, dizzyingly high. Opening your front door, you peer over the doorstep at the ground, far, far below. There is probably no chance that you would survive the fall, if you were to jump. You wonder why such a thought would even occur to you. To jump would be insane.

But there is a niggling thought, which refuses to be silenced. To jump, would be to see the world, as it really is. And, you are told, falling is a little like flying.  
You bend your knees, close your eyes, and launch yourself into space…

 

This has been your story.

The radio moves on to other things — news, traffic, political opinions, and corrections to political opinions. But there was time, one day, one single day, in which it was only one story.  
A story about you.  
And you were pleased, because you always wanted to hear about yourself on the radio.

Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.


End file.
